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AMD Lures IBM Veteran to Lead Chip Design

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the drawing-on-experience dept.

Rob writes "Computer Business Review is reporting that Advanced Micro Devices yesterday said it had hired Jeff VerHeul away from IBM to lead the direction of AMD's future silicon design. VerHeul's most recent post during his 25-year stint at IBM was head of engineering and technology services. Now, he will lead the development of all future AMD computing products, including silicon roadmap design across all AMD's engineering sites worldwide."

16 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Next slashdot story... by Saven+Marek · · Score: 5, Funny

    Who else is waiting for the next slashdot story

    "ex-IBM Engineer sued for violating non compete agreement"

  2. OMG, thist must mean... by DohnJoe · · Score: 5, Funny

    this must mean that AMD will switch to PowerPC!!!

  3. Move over Intel (hopefully) by Kawahee · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Hopefully this will give nex-gen AMD chips a fresh design and hopefully push them to a significant majority over Intel. I've always personally favoured AMD chips, simply because they're damn good value, and efficient.

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    1. Re:Move over Intel (hopefully) by gregorio · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I've always personally favoured AMD chips, simply because they're damn good value, and efficient.

      Or maybe because you're the typical geek who hates everything that's big and dominant. Geeks need to love "different" things, made for "special" people or not. Geeks need iPods and Unix computers, because other players and Windows computers are not for special people like you guys.

      If someday AMD beats the crap out of Intel and start to be the big guy, you might as well start talking about the superiority of Intel products and how it is so unfair that AMD dominates the market. =]

      And my point is...? Well, it's not really smart to be such a big fan of a company/group/etc. I think that we should give our respect to good products, actions and attitudes. Cheerleading for a commercial entity is just pure nonsense. I'm a consumer, I want good products, good actions and good attitudes. The world is about results. It's naive to expect that just because you "like" a group all of their actions are going to fit your views and needs. It's up to their shareholders if AMD is going to succeed in the long term, have giant profits or giant marketshare.

      I'm giving my soul to good results, not for companies, groups or whatever. That's why my current PC holds an AMD processor. Next time I'm buying a computer, I'll just buy whatever is best for me, AMD or not. I'm not "hoping" AMD wins, I'm just hoping the market is filled with good products and plenty of choice.

  4. IBM by Renraku · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Don't be hatin' IBM. They've had some really good ideas/innovations in the past and I figured an IBM team member would end up either at AMD or Google.

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  5. But...why? by MunchMunch · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I'm certainly not an expert, as I'm sure many replies will point out, but I thought AMD has been out-innovating IBM's PowerPC line for quite some time.

    So isn't this by all signs a step backwards?

    1. Re:But...why? by ucahg · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Do you think AMD has been out-innovating IBM because all of IBM's engineers are stupid? Do you think its the fault of this one man?

      Their strategy is simple: Hire the best they can find.

    2. Re:But...why? by ZenShadow · · Score: 3, Insightful

      PowerPC isn't IBM's only line. How about Cell? If the rumors about Intel's "new direction" prove out, having someone who developed something like the Cell in house could prove to be very fortuitous.

      -S

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    3. Re:But...why? by kalidasa · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The Cell's core CPU is a PowerPC processor. And the PPC is a very good chip - the problem is that IBM decided that it should focus on Power5 and Cell, and neglected the G5 (and had some scaling issue, IIRC). The G5 wouldn't sell nearly as many units as Cell does, and the Power5 probably has a high margin (and is for their own server products). Again, IIRC, IBM tried to sell Apple on the Cell (so they could continue to fulfill their obligations to Apple without keeping up the G5), but Apple felt that the Cell wasn't really a good choice for general-purpose computing.

  6. In other news... by bigtallmofo · · Score: 3, Funny

    In other news...

    Local Ice Cream Shop Scores Big Hiring Scoop

    Rita's Water Ice yesterday announced it had hired Mary Lopez, 15-year old former ice-cream scooper at Little Shop of Ice Cream. Lopez's career at LSIC consisted of serving drinks, hot dogs and various frozen ice cream and custard products. She will now be responsible for Rita's [...]

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  7. Athlon 64 wins performance prize by Mobile+Unit+of+the+G · · Score: 3, Informative

    It depends on the game, but the Athlon 64 usually beats the Pentium 4.

    http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_fx 57-06.html#opengl

    The Opteron, high-end cousin of the Athlon 64, is a great chip for servers. We have a Sun V40z, and the guys I work with are always amazed at how fast it is, and we've only got single core processors -- with dual cores, it'll smoke just about anything:

    http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v40z/index.jsp

  8. Pah... by gowen · · Score: 5, Funny

    Let's face it, there hasn't been a major breakthrough in chip design since Lays produced their first prototype of the "crinkle cut".

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  9. Power PC's strength is system-on-chip by Mobile+Unit+of+the+G · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Athlon wins the prize for brute CPU power, but the real strength of PowerPC is that IBM can design custom chips based on combining PowerPC cores with additional processing elements. This technology is behind Deep Blue, Blue Gene, the PS3, and the Xbox 360.

            This kind of chip is hard to program for, but can deliver unbeatable performance per dollar, square centimeter and watt when software is codesigned with the hardware.

            AMD and Intel are going in this direction with dual-core, but IBM is already way ahead. For instance, BlueGene is based on a special chip that has two PowerPC cores with an incoherent cache (tricky to program but cheap and fast) and adds an enhanced vector processing unit. IBM is a leader in higher-end SoC solutions (really, anything that gets power from the wallplug instead of a battery.) Lower-power applications are using MIPS and ARM cores instead...

  10. SMT by MrNemesis · · Score: 3, Interesting

    One thing that has been interesting me lately, after reading a series of Anadtech articles on current and near-future processor tech is the possible inclusion of SMT (oft marketed as Hyperthreading by Intel) on AMD cores.

    The article mentions the POWER5 chip and it's implementation of SMT and how it behaves with multi-core chips (i.e. how it can devote all threads on one core to a single task, with the other core(s) sharing the workload via SMT) and how it's rather more impressive that the HyperThreading[TM] on Intel P4's, although I'm not a microprocesor guru.

    Whilst I can understand AMD's decision not to put SMT in their current processors, with the recent focus on multi-core and multi-threading I think they'd be foolish not to think about it soon, and (as someone not very up on non-x86 chips) it seems IBM's POWER5 is a good base to emulate. Does anyone have any information on SMT implementations in POWER other chips like Sparc and Itanium?

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  11. Need to keep the pressure on by edxwelch · · Score: 3, Informative

    They'll need all the help they can to keep the lead on Intel.
    Intel's 90nm process was a disaster, due to leakage problems.
    According to here http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25512 Intels 65nm process solves some of the leakage problems and is due to be released very soon.
    I get the impression that this will make it on par with AMD's current 90nm process as regards power consumption.
    When the 45nm process comes out the leakage problem will be completly fixed completely.

  12. We Need a Revolution in Chip Design by MOBE2001 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hopefully this will give nex-gen AMD chips a fresh design and hopefully push them to a significant majority over Intel.

    This will not happen. Intel's marketing prowess is much better than its competition. What would scare Intel (and the others) is a revolutionary new chip that solves a major problem in the industry. Consider that all processor architectures are based on and optimized for the algorithm, a custom started by a guy named Babbage more than 150 years ago. Progress has only been incremental since.

    A really new architecture should abandon the algorithmic model and adopt a non-algorithmic, signal-based synchronous software model. It would revolutionize computing and solve the nastiest problem in the computer industry: software unreliability.

    But we cannot expect big companies like Intel, AMD and IBM to be truly innovative. Their approach is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Hopefully a bright upstart will get the message and make a killing while the behemoths are busy fighting each other for market share. They won't know what hit them until it is too late.

    The message is that there is a solution to the software reliability crisis. The disadvantage is that it will require a radical change in both processor architecture and software construction methodology. But the advantage is too good to ignore: 100% software reliability! Guaranteed!